Iris Murdoch's Fables of Unselfing

Iris Murdoch's Fables of Unselfing PDF Author: David J. Gordon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Like Jane Austen and Henry James, but also like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch is a keen student of those egoistic obsessions that cloud our moral understanding. In Iris Murdoch's Fables of Unselfing, David J. Gordon probes more deeply and comprehensively than any previous critic the intellectual energies, and the ethical imperative of "unselfing", that inform her fiction. Gordon contends that the term fable best describes the kind of novel Murdoch writes because in each a mythmaking purpose interacts with a commitment to realism, shaping the erotic life of fictional characters into a spiritual pilgrimage on which they struggle, more or less unsuccessfully, to overcome the self-centeredness that keeps them away from the Good. The most original element in the fiction, Gordon argues, is not its striking modernization of Plato or its adaptations of nineteenth-century influences, but its intensely creative struggle with Freud. In developing his analysis of her themes, Gordon draws on Murdoch's work from throughout her forty-year career, showing how each novel grew out of its predecessors and in what ways each is original.

Iris Murdoch's Fables of Unselfing

Iris Murdoch's Fables of Unselfing PDF Author: David J. Gordon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
Like Jane Austen and Henry James, but also like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch is a keen student of those egoistic obsessions that cloud our moral understanding. In Iris Murdoch's Fables of Unselfing, David J. Gordon probes more deeply and comprehensively than any previous critic the intellectual energies, and the ethical imperative of "unselfing", that inform her fiction. Gordon contends that the term fable best describes the kind of novel Murdoch writes because in each a mythmaking purpose interacts with a commitment to realism, shaping the erotic life of fictional characters into a spiritual pilgrimage on which they struggle, more or less unsuccessfully, to overcome the self-centeredness that keeps them away from the Good. The most original element in the fiction, Gordon argues, is not its striking modernization of Plato or its adaptations of nineteenth-century influences, but its intensely creative struggle with Freud. In developing his analysis of her themes, Gordon draws on Murdoch's work from throughout her forty-year career, showing how each novel grew out of its predecessors and in what ways each is original.

Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist PDF Author: Miles Leeson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441127631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This book provides a concise and highly readable reassessment of Iris Murdoch's engagement with philosophy throughout her life and proposes that she was, most importantly, a philosophical novelist. By investigating her use of philosophical argument in her fictional writing, it becomes clear that her narratives always depend upon a strong metaphysical underpinning. Leeson proceeds thematically through the philosophical phases of Murdoch's life and develops a clear argument that Murdoch reacts against the philosophies of Sartre, Plato, Nietzsche and Heidegger not only in her philosophical writings but also in her fiction. Indeed, it is in her fiction that her philosophical argument is most persuasive and accessible. This timely study provides new information regarding Murdoch's engagement with Martin Heidegger and also provides a detailed critique of critics who have overlooked Murdoch's engagement with philosophy within her fiction.

The Good Apprentice

The Good Apprentice PDF Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780141186689
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
Edward Baltram is overwhelmed with guilt. His nasty little prank has gone horribly wrong: He has fed his closest friend a sandwich laced with a hallucinogenic drug and the young man has fallen out of a window to his death. Edward searches for redemption through a reunion with his famous father, the reclusive painter Jesse Baltram. Funny and compelling, The Good Apprentice is at once a supremely sophisticated entertainment and an inquiry into the spiritual crises that afflict the modern world. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Picturing the Human

Picturing the Human PDF Author: Maria Antonaccio
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195347269
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Iris Murdoch has long been known as one of the most deeply insightful and morally passionate novelists of our time. This attention has often eclipsed Murdoch's sophisticated and influential work as a philosopher, which has had a wide-ranging impact on thinkers in moral philosophy as well as religious ethics and political theory. Yet it has never been the subject of a book-length study in its own right. Picturing the Human seeks to fill this gap. In this groundbreaking book, author Maria Antonaccio presents the first systematic and comprehensive treatment of Murdoch's moral philosophy. Unlike literary critical studies of her novels, it offers a general philosophical framework for assessing Murdoch's thought as a whole. Antonaccio also suggests a new interpretive method for reading Murdoch's philosophy and outlines the significance of her thought in the context of current debates in ethics. This vital study will appeal to those interested in moral philosophy, religious ethics, and literary criticism, and grants those who have long loved Murdoch's novels a closer look at her remarkable philosophy.

Human Flourishing in a Technological World

Human Flourishing in a Technological World PDF Author: Jens Zimmermann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192844016
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Human Flourishing in a Technological World addresses the question of human identity and flourishing in the light of recent technological advances. The chapters in Part I provide a philosophical-theological evaluation of changing major anthropological assumptions that have guided human self-understanding from antiquity to modernity: How did we move from a religious and mostly embodied anthropology of the person to the idea that we can upload human consciousness to computing platforms? How did we come to imagine that machines can actually be intelligent, or even learn in human fashion? Moreover, what metaphysical changes explain our mostly uncritical embrace of a technological determination of being and thus of how reality "works"? In Part II, the focus turns to the practical implications of our changing understanding of what it means to be human. Covering some of the most pressing current concerns about human flourishing, these chapters deal with the impact of technology on education, healthcare, disability, leisure and the nature of work, communication, aging, death, and the nature of wisdom for human flourishing in light of evolutionary biology. The volume includes the text of a lecutre by virtual reality engineer and computer scientist Jaron Lanier, and a discussion between Lanier and other contributors.

Iris Murdoch and Morality

Iris Murdoch and Morality PDF Author: Anne Rowe
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230277225
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Iris Murdoch and Morality provides a close focus on moral issues in Murdoch's novels, philosophy and theology. It situates Murdoch within current theoretical debates and develops an understanding of her work as a crucial link between twentieth and twenty-first century writing and theory.

A Philosophy to Live By

A Philosophy to Live By PDF Author: Maria Antonaccio
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199855587
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A Philosophy to Live By highlights Murdoch's distinctive conception of philosophy as a spiritual or existential practice and enlists the resources of her thought to explore a wide range of thinkers and debates at the intersections of moral philosophy, religion, art, and politics.

Iris Murdoch and Remorse

Iris Murdoch and Remorse PDF Author: Frances White
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031430131
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description


Fairy Tales and the Fiction of Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and A.S. Byatt

Fairy Tales and the Fiction of Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and A.S. Byatt PDF Author: Lisa M. Fiander
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820472539
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The Grimm brothers' fairy tales have long fascinated readers with their violence and frank sexuality. Three of Britain's most important novelists, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and A. S. Byatt, have shared this fascination. Their fiction explores the darker themes of fairy tales - bestiality, cannibalism, and incest - and finds within them reasons to be optimistic about our fractured modern world.

Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch

Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch PDF Author: Julia T. Meszaros
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191078360
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
In an age of self-affirmation and self-assertion, 'selfless love' can appear as a threat to the lover's personal well-being. This perception jars with the Biblical promise that we gain our life through losing it and therefore calls for a theological response. In conversation with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and the atheistic moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch enquires into the anthropological grounds on which selfless love can be said to build up, rather than undermine, the lover's self. It proposes that while the implausibility of selfless love was furthered by the modern deconstruction of the self, both Tillich and Murdoch utilize this very deconstruction towards explicating and restoring the link between selfless love and human flourishing. Julia T. Meszaros shows that they use the modern diagnosis of the human being's lack of a stable and independent self as manifest in Sartre's existentialism in support of an understanding of the self as relational and fallen. This leads them to view a loving orientation away from self and a surrender to the other as critical to the full flourishing of human selfhood. In arguing that Tillich and Murdoch defend the link between selfless love and human flourishing through reference to the human being's ontological selflessness, Meszaros closely engages Søren Kierkegaard's earlier attempt to keep selfless love and human flourishing in a productive, dialectical tension. She also examines the breakdown of this tension in the later figures of Anders Nygren, Simone Weil, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and addresses the pitfalls of this breakdown. Her examination concludes by arguing that the link between selfless love and human flourishing would be strengthened by a more resolute endorsement of a personal God, and of the reciprocal nature of selfless love.